excerpts / Monteverdi’s Vespers performance

2020 — visual art for performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers — a maya + rouvelle collaboration.

Our studio created the visual art for for the March 1, 2020 performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Shriver Hall in Baltimore. The performers included the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, all conducted by Blake Clark.

Our video project included entirely original footage shot in Italy, Spain, and the US. Some of the imagery is based on, and includes excerpts from works by Fra Angelico, Andrei Rublev, Jan Van Eyck, Aert van der Neer, Mosaics from the Basilica di San Marco, Venice, and The Osservanza Master.

The complete videos we made for each movement with the Vespers conducted by John Eliot Gardner, as well as some writing on the project are here. Still images from the concert are here.

pulse, drift, ping, echo

maya.rouvelle-pulse-drift-ping-echo
maya.rouvelle-pulse-drift-ping-echo

2018 — installation — a maya + rouvelle collaboration.

pulse, drift, ping, echo is an installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibit curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps.

The individual glass pieces were made at a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, a residency at Pilchuck Glass School and at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn.

In addition to kinetic and sonic qualities produced by electromagnetism, this new installation includes a haptic section where visitors can touch the glass and feel resonant frequencies pulsing through specific objects.

Inspired by the translucence of glass, our work embodies invisible forces indexed in the shapes, behaviors and sensual qualities of each object. Electromagnetism and code influence the movements of round neodymium magnets inside some of the pieces. The resulting sounds reveal unique acoustic properties.

from the exhibition label:

“Inside two display cases are glass volumes in the shape of cones, domes, and droopy tubes. Tiny metal spheres roll around inside the vessels, tapping lightly against the glass. These little spheres are powerful magnets. Installed underneath the tabletop are electromagnets. The tiny spheres change direction when the electromagnets switch their polarity from north/south to south/north. Created by Lili Maya and James Rouvelle, the piece sounds delicate and irregular, like falling rain.

Some glass shapes are exposed on the tabletop. Artists Lili Maya and James Rouvelle created this special touch component of their piece especially for this exhibition.”

The work is also featured in the exhibition catalog, available here: http://shop.cooperhewitt.org/p/8615/The-Senses-Design-Beyond-Vision

caesura

maya-rouvelle-caesure

2018 — installation — a maya + rouvelle collaboration

The translucence of glass – the ability to see through a solid form, has always interested us. In our previous work with glass we explored sound as another less visible aspect of the medium – but a quality with enormous physical resonance and emotional power. The invisibility of sound waves, their coupling with the physical realities of the objects that create them, and the translucence of glass are, for us, situated at the border of understanding and imagination.

Curated by Benjamin Wright, our new work for Pushing Buttons @ UrbanGlass can be understood as a tableau — a portrait, but a portrait absent of a specific, human subject. Yet the evidence of a presence, the things that would be around a person, or a group of persons, are all there. An absence is perceived in an act of both observation and imagination. This is a kind of transparency of a foundational structure that to us is analogous to glass.

The relationship of Artifice and the natural world is at the center of Caesura. Yet the natural world, represented by replicas, appears authentically only in video on tiny screens. The electronics, glass and other manmade components are presented in various contradictory situations as if the persons who inhabit this world have lost a clear sense of a conflict between organic and inorganic, between reason, and fantasy.

Caesura is not a synthesis, it is an amalgam. The irregular rhythm of the metronome, placed within the tableau at the scale of a monument and covered in a large symmetrical glass bell with a funky handle, suggests that one’s reason is prone to produce mysteries and data in equal measure. Perhaps pitting these aspects against each other is obscuring a perception of the invisible, formative structures of which we are a part, and within which conflict is an illusion.

Full Flickr set/video here.

à la vitesse de ton souffle

mayarouvelle-vitesse

2013 – a maya + rouvelle collaboration / more information + video documentation @ maya + rouvelle and vimeo

à la vitesse de ton souffle was influenced by our time walking in and around Paris, La Générale/AtelierPier (residency/gallery) and Versailles – it is an installation in the form of a sequence of compositions and spaces made of sound, light, objects, code and movement, activated by visitors walking through the gallery at the speed of their own breathing.